Posts by breakfast 1557 publicly visible posts • joined 24 May 2007
We learn that Samsung have "a synthetic material for work surfaces called Staron that can be shaped and used in similar way to Corian."
That is pretty great, because I knew nothing about Staron, but hearing it can be used in a similar way to Corian has made everything completely clear thanks to my in-depth knowledge of furniture-related materials.
I was thinking about this just the other day, specifically the excellent bonus level that only appeared on a full moon. That was pretty neat - it didn't occur to me to change my computer's date ( I was young and kind of a chump ) so I remember being pleased to realise it was a full moon and I could explore that level.
I'm really not sure about the whole Twitter business model. I mean, how do they get from where they are now to where money comes to them from their user base, without alienating that user base who use the service on a daily basis.
I like Twitter and I use it a whole lot, but I only use it for reading tweets, sending tweets and sometimes to join in conversations, which is basically what the service offers. I don't see how those things can be monetised unless they wanted to start charging me for them, which would probably lead to other free competitors who aren't yet on the "need to make a profit" part of the curve overtaking them.
I'd say Monbiot is accurate way more than the time and is endlessly less deliberately contrarian than certain locals whose surnames begin with O. He's one of the few journalists in the area who is putting a decent effort into understanding the science he is talking about and who suggests solutions rather than just writing reams of "we're doomed" which is a common trait amongst environmental writers.
I'm probably biased - I like the environment so much that I live there - but maybe reading some of his work would allow you to have an informed opinion. Hating someone because Jeremy Clarkson told you to is a little embarrassing.
"What is it Ug?"
"Ug have vision. Ug see great camp of many caves. This picture is map of camp."
"Who has camp?"
"Ug not know. But it bigger than all the camps in the world. It guarded by great bison made of stone."
"Do you think was future, Ug?"
"Ug says it was a true seeing."
...
"Perhaps we choose extinction instead, Ug."
Also the new maps doesn't work at all on Chrome for Linux for quite a lot of users. Or at least it just shows a completely black screen, so I guess maybe it's just forecasting our imminent vanishing into a cunningly hidden singularity or something. But it's quite annoying if you want to look at a map.
Questioning whether reality is real is one of those things that, although appealing to a stoned undergrad, doesn't really make much sense. It's reality, what else is it going to be?
What it is made of is undeniably an interesting question, but whatever the form of the structure is ( a holographic sheen on the surface of an n-dimensional super--bubble perhaps ) it won't change how real it is.
Just because you can do anything in JavaScript doesn't mean you should.
One of the things you can do in JavaScript is make it behave a little like a well-thought-through and usable language, but the effort is non-trivial. This is one reason I find Node so baffling- why are we taking the one of the most irritating languages around and putting it on the server rather than dedicating some effort to picking one of the many excellent languages that exist already and making it run in the browser?
Long years ago when I was a student we collectively played the Occarina Of Time on the house N64. Wow, that looks like a euphemism now I see it in writing. Hmmm.
Anyway, one thing we noticed was that whoever had the controller immediately became a total idiot- everyone else could easily accomplish whatever strategy we had just come up with but they kept crashing into walls, falling into lava or getting arbitrarily killed by bats. It was infuriating. The only thing more frustrating was when you got hold of the controller and suddenly it turned out you were the chump.
One of the weird beliefs that has political currency, which will seem as curious and antiquated to future generations as the imperial beliefs or radium healthcare of our predecessors are to us, is that markets make everything better, or that every political problem is a type of problem that can be solved by a market.
It is, of course, idiocy. But it is idiocy of the kind that is very fashionable around the world's politicians right now - and also commentards, I anticipate a flurry of downvotes here - so I suppose there will need to be some terrible disasters before anybody with any authority has the wit to question it.
In sane countries it is the method for making things work that gets patented. From what I can tell in the US you do just patent an idea, a thought or something you dreamed about and then you can go sue-crazy on anyone who actually implements something remotely like it even though the patent contains no detailed design information at all.
It is a fair point, but once you have used a real OO language like Ruby or Python ( or Java, C#, Smalltalk or whatever else attracts your whimsy ) the shortcomings of PHP's implementation start to become somewhat glaring - it may be no more tacked on than Perl's, but it also doesn't do a lot of things that an optimist might hope for.
That said, it's a few years since I have endeavoured to wrangle PHP's object system into something that resembled a thing a person might be able to use, so it has probably got a lot better than it used to be.
"relatively sane" and "OO" - I do not think those words mean what you think they mean.
For me, this is the definitive summary of PHP: http://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/
By combining PHP and JavaScript you end up creating a perfect storm of badly designed but carefully implemented languages. Someone who had worked with both exclusively ( as many web developers have ) would probably think that being insane was a basic feature of a programming language.
Sounds like linux on the desktop is just around the corner...
Actually there may be several corners as the Linux office suite that packs with the latest Ubuntu is chaotically unreliable and gaspingly slow even on a new and powerful desktop. It's not a big part of my job, so it's fine for me, but I would hate to be having to work with it.
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